What Your Olympic Crush Says About You

Everyone watching the Sochi games has a crush on someonecompeting for a medal in some event. How could you not? Everyone's young and in peak physical shape and lots of them have adorable accents! But which kind of athlete do you prefer? And what does that say about you? Let's break it down.

The Ice Dancer

You’ve been to Disney World let’s say… a few times. Let’s just call the number of visits to Disney World that you’ve made as an adult “a few.” You work in Human Resources but you’re not one of those too chipper weirdos. You get it. You’re a straight-shooter when you can be. You like a glass of wine or a margarita and you’ve been known to smoke a cigarette or two when out drinking with coworkers. You own a condo that has at least one room you haven’t gotten around to furnishing yet, so for now it’s just blinds in unwrapped packaging lying on the gray wall-to-wall carpeting and a box marked “Christmas stuff.” You live somewhere cold but are careful to try to enjoy every season, always pointing out when there are ice skaters on the pond near your condo and saying, “That looks fun.” Back in high school you were in a couple musicals, small parts, but you weren’t bad, everyone said so, even the teacher. You consider yourself a romantic, though the last person you dated wasn’t very romantic at all—it was mostly going to a movie and some bad chain restaurant, whiling away the hours talking about things you heard on the radio on your drive to work. It’s not that it wasn’t a good relationship, it was fine, but there was something missing. Sometimes on Sunday nights, before you unmute the TV, you find yourself aimlessly wandering around Paris on Google Street View and wondering what if... Then the Olympics start and you turn up the volume and there are Charlie White and Meryl Davis or some attractive, elegant Russian couple looking like a prince and princess and you sigh and think, “That looks fun." And you settle back into the couch and let yourself dream for just a little bit.

The Ski Jumper__

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by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

You’ve always fancied yourself a little different, a little outside the mainstream. You live in a weird neighborhood that nobody else you know lives in. You shop at a lot of thrift stores but you’re not that good at hunting out the real finds, so you often have to supplement your look with stuff you buy, kinda secretly, at regular stores. Maybe you weren’t born in the U.S., or you at least wish you weren’t born in the U.S. You went to a big state school and kinda never found your group—one semester it was the pottery kids, another it was a bunch of Pynchon-obsessed lit majors, another it was this weird social justice group that years later kinda turned into an actual cult—and you’ve lately found yourself, despite your asserted difference, drifting listlessly toward the mainstream. You work in academic publishing, or at a museum gift shop, or maybe you’re taking some time off and living back at your parents’, who pay you a few bucks here and there to do their grocery shopping and clean out their gutters. Your parents have been watching the Olympics lately and something about the ski jumpers, all solitary and pensive and Nordic, has really appealed to you. And you like that it’s weird, that there are no famous American ski jumpers, that you’ve never even seen a ski jump course. But now you can speak with a little bit of authority about ski jumping, and maybe rattle off a list of your favorite jumpers to your friend Diane when you two get tea later this week. And she’ll look at you and nod her head and wonder how long this new phase will last until you give up and wander off somewhere else.

The Downhill Skier

by Julian Finney/Getty Images

You fancy yourself pretty tough. You started smoking in college with the express purpose of looking cool and now, well, now you just smoke. But you still wear the habit like a badge of honor, like proof of something. You like to swear a lot, but you’re not as good at swearing as you think you are. (You either do it too much or your word choice is wrong, depending on the situation.) But that doesn’t mean that you aren’t cool. You are, you’re a good time. You work at a radio station or, seemingly incongruous to your personality, you teach. Maybe high school history. You do comedy in your spare time, standup and/or improv, and you’re really into craft beer. You’re kind of an “Olympics are dumb” kind of a person, because you like being contrarian, even though the older you get the more exhausting it’s become. But you were at a friend’s house and everyone was watching the Olympics, and you were saying “So laaaame” really loud for a while but then you noticed that no one was laughing or even telling you to shut up anymore, so you quieted down and started watching and something about that downhill skiing, seeing them go whipping around those turns or flying off those jumps, it actually seemed kinda cool. And that one skier with the determined look on their face and that flint of something hard and maybe haunted in their eyes… You didn’t say anything to your friends about it, but when you got home you looked them up online and then a couple days later your friends were surprised to hear you talking about watching skiing again. But they didn't think much of it, sometimes you just change your mind about things.

The Figure Skater

by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post via Getty Images

You are different than someone who has a crush on an ice dancer. Don’t get that confused. You're a bit more with-it, maybe. Your aunt calls you a “pop culture junkie.” When you go home for holidays or whatever, everyone’s always asking you, “What’s good at the movies?” “What show should I be watching?” and you indulge them because quietly, and a bit shamefully, you know it’ll make for a good joke when you’re back with your friends, or on your blog, or on Twitter, maybe even at one of those “storytelling” reading things you do on occasion. You’re “the funny one,” you’re pretty sure. You work in some field that requires you to be outgoing, like sales, but oftentimes you feel like you want to be doing something else, maybe something more serious or creative. You talk about showbiz things like “pilot season” knowingly, and every time you do, it fills you with just the slightest pang of something. Is it regret? Envy? Maybe even the smallest hint of embarrassment? You’re not quite sure and you don't like thinking about it, so you move on and ignore it. You’re an Olympics fan, you can rattle off stats about games going back years and years, about skiers and random other athletes. There’s a hint of irony to all of it, an arch sense of "Isn't it funny that I know all this about weird athletes?", but a part of you that you don’t reveal loves it genuinely, and entirely. And there’s that one skater, clean and bright-faced, lithe and sinewy. Perfect, really. You make a joke out of how much you love them, but inside you mean it. You really, really mean it. Like so much in your life, you mean it a lot more than most people think you do.

The Snowboarder

by Darren Cummings/Pool/Getty Images

You went to school in Vermont or Montana or just went on regular weekend ski trips as a kid. You used to smoke a lot of weed in high school and college and it’s tapered off a lot now, been replaced with wine at dinner parties or maybe nothing at all, but you still feel some primal connection to that old part of yourself, to the shaggy guys and girls you used to hang out with around campfires and candlelight on splintery tables. Though you’re a lot busier and more focused these days—the nagging part of you that can’t sit still for too long eventually took over, and now you’re too stressed to act as laidback as you once could—you still identify some part of yourself with all that easygoing, whatever brah stuff. You miss guys like Sage Kotsenburg, and free-spirit goddesses like Jamie Anderson. If you’re honest with yourself, you especially miss the assholes, those boys like Mark McMorris, who fancied themselves a little tough, who had an edge of menace fizzing like a neon halo around all that smooth mellowness. You don’t want to go back to those days, because you were so cloudy in the head back then and now you live in a big city and always have things to do, but sometimes, like when you turn on the Olympics when home alone in your apartment at night, you miss it. The sing-song of their lingo, the flat-brimmed baseball caps or whatever it was they were wearing in your day, the spark of lighters cutting through the cold night in someone’s backyard, where you’d talk about the future and not imagine much of anything beyond doing more of all that.

Vladimir Putin

ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP/Getty Images

If your Olympics crush is Vladimir Putin you are a good Russian and you bring honor to your family. You might also be Evgeni Plushenko.